Cuba / Cuban Affairs

           I have been thinking about the signs of death and of hope in Cuba

I have the feeling that, for our people, the transition from 2025 to 2026 has been an emotionally contradictory moment and, at the same time, a comprehensibly logical one.

We leave behind a year marked by signs of death that have not only been with us for a long time but have intensified throughout the year that has ended: the death of light, of hygiene in the streets, of public health, of a dignified life, of adequate food… the death of freedom, of joy, of the desire to live on this land.

But these deaths seem to have given new life to hope. Never before have we been a people so sunk, so bound hand and foot, and so repressed; and never before have we begun a year with the hope that this nightmare will end. Never before have we greeted one another on the last night of December wishing that this would be THE YEAR: the year of freedom, the year of change.

It is true that we do not know what it might look like. Certainly, we do not expect change to arise from the country’s ruling spheres. Nearly seventy years ago, a family took control of the nation and has run it like its personal estate, aided by those whom that family chose and those to whom it decided to grant power—a power that, however, it keeps under control, to withdraw whenever it wishes.

Throughout all these years, amid empty promises, repeated lies, and brutal repression, in Cuba they have controlled the country like a private estate and have stifled every attempt at change, dialogue, or dissent, while the estate became increasingly unproductive and unlivable for everyone except them.

We have entered a new year, but carrying old burdens: the burdens of exhaustion and weariness.

We are fed up with this non-life, with empty promises and the constant mockery of our intelligence; we are fed up with working so hard for nothing, with so much scarcity and misery; we are fed up with the absence of our children, imprisoned or forced to emigrate; we are fed up with freedom being demanded while we are mistreated and public expression being treated as a crime, with being continually threatened and harassed; and we are fed up with living in fear.

We are fed up with the destruction of our families, with attacks on the work of the churches, with the obstacles placed in the way of every citizen effort to improve the economy.

We are fed up with being run like a private estate, with being slaves in our own land, with dragging out our existence and watching our one and only life turn into nothing.

And it may seem contradictory that death can generate so much life, but the truth is that all this death we have been carrying for years has revitalized hope: the hope that something will happen to restore light to this land, or the hope that we will understand that together we must do something ourselves to bring light back to this dark land.